Zero Hour
by Stellaluna
Summary: This is hell, nor are we out of it.


**Summary:** This is hell, nor are we out of it.

**Spoilers:** Nothing specific; references to various episodes, including "Blink" and "Officer Blue."

**Rating:** PG-13 for language

**Disclaimer:** None of these are mine. Characters are the property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer Television, CBS, and Alliance Atlantis.

**Archive:** Please ask.

**Note:** Thank you to Vickie for the beta read, and for the image of the blood.

Nights he can't sleep, which is most of them, he lies on his back and says the Periodic Table of the Elements in his head, or the Nicene Creed. It's nothing but a more sophisticated version of counting sheep, and he knows that, but it's okay. There's no one around he needs to impress, and anyone who he thinks might laugh at this habit -- or worse, look at him with sympathy -- will never know about it. It's not exactly something he'd chat about in the break room with Stella or Danny. Not that he spends much time in the break room anyway. Or chatting, for that matter.

This is assuming he's home in the first place. There are nights during the week when he never leaves the office at all, except to go down the block to the 24-hour deli for more battery acid-strength coffee. People don't notice you've been wearing the same suit for three days in a row as long as you change the shirt and tie, he's learned; and he keeps plenty of both, along with underwear and socks, in a locked drawer of his desk. If he thinks far enough ahead, he can go until the weekend without ever seeing the four walls of his apartment.

_...We believe in one God, the Father Almighty..._

But he has to go home eventually, no matter what (he's thought once or twice that he could simply take a crosstown bus to Fifth Avenue once a week, get a new suit at Brooks Brothers, but always dismisses this idea as impractical, plus he realizes that this would be crossing some line probably better avoided); and so sooner or later he ends up on the far side of 3:00 a.m., memorizing the waterstains in the ceiling.

_...Li, lithium, 6.941; Be, beryllium..._

Sometimes, if it's bad enough that not even the old prayers and recitation of metals can quiet the voices in his head, he gets up and gets dressed and walks down to the Promenade. He's always prepared to meet a mugger, and he never has. He carries his service revolver, strapped against his ribs under his jacket, but they don't know that. Maybe the ancient track pants and t-shirt he's usually wearing at that hour don't scream "cash cow" to any potential thieves, or more likely something about him acts as a ward. Very occasionally, he passes someone out walking their dog, or a late-night jogger, but most times he's the only living soul in sight. He walks the river and tries not to look at Manhattan across the water, but his gaze is drawn to it every time.

_...For our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate..._

He didn't used to live in Brooklyn. He used to live in Manhattan: not in a stylish neighborhood, granted. It hadn't taken him long after 9/11 to realize that he couldn't keep paying the rent on the co-op, not on his cop's salary; even in the old days, they were barely making it most months, and that was with Claire's fancy paycheck. It was for the best, he thought, circling ads in the Sunday _Times_. Since getting rid of her things (all but the goddamn beach ball), he hadn't bothered to clean the place, and dust lay thick everywhere he looked. There was little point, and too many memories with razor-sharp edges. He needed to move on, to move out.

Brooklyn used to be low-rent, in all senses of the term; he knows that it got expensive around the mid-90s, after all the post-college scenesters discovered they could live two stops away on the N train for a fraction of what they were paying for a closet in Alphabet City. Even with gentrification, though, it's within his means, and he signed a lease for a one-bedroom in a building that was still crumbling around the edges. Now he nods to the old ladies on their way to church and synagogue, and to the art gallery assistants with their pink hair and messenger bags, and he meets none of their eyes, ever.

_...Sc, scandium, 44.955910..._

The siren call of other people's lives is a weight on him these days. He doesn't want to know the minutiae of his co-workers' or neighbors' private concerns. Being drawn into discussion of anything that doesn't bear upon the job seems an unbearable burden, one he doesn't want to be inveigled into taking on. Yet they keep trying.

Whether it's Stella trying to convince him to come to Sullivan's for an after-work drink, or Danny insisting that he join the pick-up game Flack has started out back, or just Mrs. Rosenstein from 4D, who trapped him in the elevator one day and started quizzing him about why such a nice man lived in that big apartment all alone, he wants no part of it. In the last instance, he had nodded and smiled and stared at a point just past her shoulder until he could get away; sharing Claire with this harmless grandmother was out of the question.

Danny is easy enough to put off: there's always work, and he has the excuse of his bad leg if it's a rare slow day. Stella is more of a challenge. She knows too much, sees too much. Unlike Danny, who is at least somewhat constrained by social and professional niceties, she'll look him in the eye and call bullshit, and not flinch while she does it. It's best just to let her think that there's nothing left, that their old close friendship is as dead as...as the corpses they study every day. If she sees even the slightest chink in his armor, he knows, thinking back to their fight over the Velasquez case, she'll pounce. And God knows that Stella is nothing if not relentless.

_...He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end..._

If the insomnia lasts for many days in a row, the objects around him develop a hazy nimbus, as if powered by some inner, unseen light source. The world sways gently back and forth as he walks, what he imagines it would be like to have a permanent case of vertigo, or what he knows it's like to walk the deck of a ship when the sea is rough, a persistent side-to-side roll that lacks only the smell of salt water in the air. He knows it's becoming very bad when he begins to see movement just out of his field of vision; he will spot something from the corner of his eye, a quick flurry or flash of light. No matter how quickly he turns around, there's never anything there.

He doesn't worry about it any more; he always sleeps eventually. He knows this, because he also knows that no human being can survive for long on no sleep at all. He's still here and still functioning, and the insomnia has never yet caused him to fuck up on the job. It never will: he tells himself this. And that's the only thing that really matters. If the sleep he eventually gets is short and broken, and interrupted by half-remembered dreams that send him stumbling out of bed with his breath coming in short, fearful gasps...well, that's all right. You can't miss what you've never had, or what you've forgotten. He tells himself this, too.

_...We believe in one holy Catholic and apostolic Church. As, arsenic..._

The zero hours of his life have always arrived in blood and fire. Long before 9/11, long before Claire and New York, even before the Persian Gulf and Sarajevo, there was Beirut. He was a dumb kid only a few years out of his poor Chicago neighborhood, standing in the barracks rubble with blood running down the side of his face and temporarily deaf, feeling himself a fixed point in the midst of the frantic activity all around him. There would be time later to wonder why he was alive when 241 were dead, time to contemplate the unfairness of the universe and what a cruel bitch mistress fate could be. In that moment, there was only the salt sting in his eyes and smoke filling his lungs, and thoughts running around in circles: _what the fuck, fuck just happened, can't find, where's Billy, can't find me, the fuck..._

Eighteen years later, same thing all over again, Stella pushing past him to get to the window and the phones suddenly going crazy in the background, shouts from down the hall in the DNA lab. And him sitting still at his desk, a phantom caress of blood on one cheek and his hand halfway up to brush it away before he realized, trying to make sense of meaningless words. _Jesus they hit, they hit the towers, a plane they, the fuck is going on..._

And then the phones all suddenly went silent. Just as suddenly, the jumble of voices in his mind began to smooth out into the blank hum of what he recognized as shock, and by the time he was able to make his legs work and get up from his chair, it was far too late for anything to be done. (It had been far too late long before anyone ever even saw the first plane, he would argue with himself in the months to come.)

_...We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. Iridium, 192.217. We look for the resurrection of the dead..._

Down on the Promenade, the cold December wind snapping against his face, he leans on the railing, eyes fixed on the city skyline across the water. This is zero hour, too, every night, and all the days of his life. He fears, not that this is Hell, but that it may be only Purgatory. Not stasis, but the possibility of change chills him to the bone. Heaven is no longer a possibility, not in his cosmos, no matter what the prayers at Mass tell him.

Purgatory. Hell.

_...and the life of the world to come. Amen._

Flip a coin.


End file.
